And now this tech has progressed to the point where the limiting factor is the speed of light.

High Speed Stock Tickers to Ease Record Market Days

THE Western Union is spending $4,500,000 in an effort to speed up stock quotation service. The task is the largest in quotation service history and is the culmination of three years of labor, six months’ training of personnel in schools
of five cities, the construction of 5,000 city to city wiring and circuit channels in 350 cities and towns in the North American continent. High speed tickers have been ordered at a cost of $2,500,000 to be rented to brokers in the United States.

TELEPHONE subscribers will soon be getting a new, small-size phone like the one shown at left. The set will be offered in several colors and, later, in two models. The first model will feature a combined night-light and dial-light. The second model will have a two-line pick-up with a hold button for the first line and provision for use with home-intercommunication and speakerphone systems. Quantity production of the novel telephones is expected to begin in 1960. •

Once there were none, now there are many battery-powered tape recorders at a variety of prices.

A BOUT five years ago you would have had to look mighty hard to find a small, battery-operated tape recorder. Chances are that if you had wanted one badly enough, you would have had it especially made for you at a fancy figure. Today, however, all that is changed. Whether you be in America, Europe, or Asia, you can take your pick of many transistorized recorders—and there are more coming all the time!

This, of course, is the radio waves bouncing off of the ionosphere. I think they’ve known this for quite a while though. Does anyone know when it was figured out?

“Skip Distance” a Radio Mystery

TO MANY uninitiated to the mystery of radio the phenomenon known as ‘”skip distance” is most puzzling. The layman might reasonably assume that the closer one is to a broadcast station the stronger the signals received. That is largely true with ordinary longwave stations but with a shortwave transmitter the situation changes. For instance a short-wave transmitter in New York operating on less power than is ordinarily used by long-wave stations may be picked up in Australia but not be picked up at all by receivers less than 500 miles from the transmitter.

I’m pretty sure that there is enough bandwidth out there now that every single person on earth could be on the phone at the same time. Though, there’d probably be some seriously over saturated lines in more remote locales.

Incidentally, those calls cost roughly $119 a minute in 2009 dollars.

207 Talk Across Ocean on Xmas

CHRISTMAS traffic on the overseas telephone circuits of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company this year eclipsed all previous records. Throughout the day a total of 207 messages was handled, and the connections established involved Europe, South America, Australia, and the “S. S. Belgeland” off the west coast of Central America.

Practically all of the traffic was of a social or personal nature, involving interchange of holiday greetings. The average length of the conversations was five minutes, at a rate of $30 for the first three minutes.

I’ve always wondered if the MoviePhone guy ever uses his own service and if it freaks him out.

She Tells Herself the Time

LONDON now has a time-telling telephone service, obtained by dialing T-I-M on the automatic exchanges. A natural-sounding voice gives the time— but it is, as a matter of fact, a phonographic reproduction. It has been recorded on a glass disc, in the same manner as sound tracks are put on moving-picture films, and similarly reproduced electrically in any telephone circuit connected in. The phone thus functions as does a theatre loud speaker, when connected in the projector’s amplifier circuit.

THIS new hookup board will gladden the heart of many a newcomer into radio because of the ease with which it allows the novice to hook up his receiver. It eliminates all wiring from part to part and practically any type of circuit can be employed. Consequently the following of blueprints and diagrams can be avoided and the various items assembled by merely plugging them in the proper sockets in the board.

EASTERN criminals on the “lam” must move faster than ever today if they want to make good their escape for they are being trailed by teletypewriters and airplane police. The Pennsylvania State Police have been provided with tele- typewriters distributed in five zones throughout the state. Alarms and descriptions of crooks as written on the typewriter in the sending office are received throughout the state on electric typewriters just as fast as the sender can write. And in Bergen county, New Jersey, Peter J. Siccardi, chief of the traffic squad, has organized a squad of five flying police officers.